Michael Kimball - The Way the Family Got Away

They left food on the windowsill and my mother would open the window far enough up to slide the food inside our house and us. They left more food outside the doors or on the porch and we would wait for them to leave before we brought the food inside to eat it. They would always look back at our house before they got into their cars and drove away from our house and our family and us. They were trying to see what we looked like and did and the way that we lived there after my brother died.

We lived inside our house and ourselves. We did not talk to each other even though my mother would talk to herself. We got my brother and everything else in our family and house ready for everybody else to come over and inside and see it. People drove over from Sweetwater and Chico and Riverland and they parked their cars all up and down the road in front of our house and in our front yard. They drove in from Killeen and Overton and came inside our house to see my brother and us. They drove up from Tyler and Sugar Land and Old Dime Box and everybody wanted to talk about my brother and the way that we laid him down in his casket.

This lady from Amarillo talked about the dead people that we shared in our family—my brother and her sister. This man from Hull Lake told me that we die in families so that somebody remembers us and can tell other people about it. This man from Brownland told my sister and me that neither one of us was the dead one so we shouldn’t cry anymore. This lady from Kossetown told us that we can’t get away from our family or dying but that my mother and father would get another brother for us.

But everybody also stopped talking to us and looking at my brother and they all left my brother and us and our family and house. My father told us that my brother gone was enough for the rest of us to gather ourselves and our stuff up and leave that place too. We couldn’t stay in our house or Mineola anymore. My brother was dead and we couldn’t live there either.

My doll-family plays better at family than my people one does. My Poppa-doll got lost somewhere but Momma told me it was okay for me to make me another Poppa-doll out of string-clothes and buttons and him all kept together with popsicle sticks.

The doll of my little brother got left out under the sun one day once and the yellow-fever colored my little brother in sun-colored. We had to take my little brother to see big-people where they put stuff inside his mouth and touched on how bright was the color of his forehead. There was the poke-poke lady with all her more fingers. There was the fold-handed man that threw drops of water all around the room but that never made it rain outside.

One more way they didn’t make up to make him not as sun-hot as he was was ice cubes inside his diapers. One more way was saying baby and in and air and out from my mouth on him. One more way was coloring his skin back in skin-colored with my crayons. One more way was hanging his baby clothes up on tree-arms but that was only to be inside the shade.

The sun-color got too bright and too inside under my little brother’s skin until it burned his insides out inside his crib. My little brother lived with me and my doll-family after he burned up inside and big-people came over to see how he did it. Big-people carried food over but we didn’t even feed any of it to my little brother. The rest of us ate all of it even though we were all already alive. One man had tree-arms that carried a treeful of red apples and green apples and that kept anyone else from catching any yellow-fever from my little brother.

One more man pushed a button that made light flash that burned your eyes up but did not make it so hot as to burn us up inside. The light flashing made looking-pictures of my little brother on Momma’s lap and one more way to make babies go away to alive. That man blew on the looking-pictures of my little brother until he was out of breath and which but that just left my little brother all small and flat.

My little brother was even littler when he was dead. But more and more big-people came over to our house and one more man had more ways than me to keep my little brother alive. That man wore a burnt-colored knee-coat that was still warm. You could see how hot it was in his hot-colored face and the way he blew his cheeks out to get the hot part out of him. Momma told me that dead people was all that that man did but that that man wasn’t going to take my little brother away from us. We were going to take my little brother away with us. That man was just supposed to get him ready to go.

He undressed the clothes even though my little brother was already cold. But clothes can’t be alive anyway and that man didn’t keep going when he got down to my little brother’s skin. That man took up a bucket of rain water and squeeze-clouds that he carried down with him out of the sky. That man squeezed the squeeze-clouds of rain water down over my little brother so it would drown him in the swallow of water and smoke the fire out that burned his insides up. He dried my little brother down inside a towel like the one they wrapped him up in to bring him home in after he was born. That man unwrapped the towel from my little brother and rained handfuls of rain water up over his head and down over his neck and out the ends of his hair. We combed it out and it looked nice. That man smelled his nose down into the neck and shoulder and snuffled my little brother. That man touched my little brother’s eyelids down with his finger and thumb like Poppa would pull the window-cover down before he would put us down for sleep. But how was my little brother going to see us anymore when his eyes were closed?

That man stuffed cotton balls and worded-paper inside my little brother’s mouth so he could see how to talk. That man got out the needle and thread and asked me how my little brother smiled. He threaded the thread through the needle and the needle and thread into and out of his lips so it could not be told. He got a moon-knife out of his night-bag and cut cuts inside both the elbows and the knees both. He pushed tubes into my little brother but we didn’t feed him any food through them. The squeeze-pump sucked and pulled. It spit and pushed the blood. The tubes he looped into my little brother were outside-veins for the clear-blood that flooded the burned and dead-blood out from my little brother.

That man let me touch where my little brother should have started up again but my hand never breathed up or down on him. We hit and pushed my little brother on his rib bones but that didn’t start his heart beating up or down again either. That just made my little brother go all see-through and angel-colored so we stopped squeezing the squeeze-pump and pulled the tubes out and stopped the holes up.

We colored his skin back in skin-colored with paint brushes from that man’s night-bag. We painted his face and neck and hands back on him but it did not look real or alive enough even when it didn’t even have to be pretty. That man told me let’s dress him up nice so we put dress-up clothes on him but my little brother still didn’t get up and live.

The men went from living room to bedroom and bedroom and bathroom to kitchen. The men went into and out of the rooms and into and out of our house. The men went back and forth between our house and their truck. They got the couch up between two of them and carried it out. One of them took the cushions. Another one of them carried a chair. Another one of them carried another chair. Their arms and the other parts of them were all large. They made the doorways small with themselves and the furniture they carried out of the rooms, away down the hallway, and out of our house—table, lamp, table and chairs, dresser and dresser, bed and bed and bed.